Beyond the Zenith
by Zaedah
Summary: It’s bad luck to cling to God’s toys when He expects them back.


Five snapshot moments among the anxieties of Anthony DiNozzo...

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**Beyond the Zenith**

_phobia__ = A persistent, abnormal, or irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid the feared stimulus._

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**Lygophobia (fear of darkness)**

The broken-glass features of the cowboy stare back at the awestruck boy, hollow eyes reaching out to the gasping observer before the body falls to the dust. A monochrome prairie is poorer for the deputy's loss. And as stark white block letters trample over the fading gray scene, the six year old remains cross-legged on the floor, trying to extend the last seconds of a hero's valiant sacrifice. The living room television emits a blue tint that he hopes sleeping parents won't notice. Little Anthony's bedtime eclipsed hours ago, a rule he prefers to take as a suggestion. The snowy UHF channel offers enough distractions to keep him awake indefinitely. Some nights, his mother joins him on the floor, holding him tight and whispering that the noble cowboy represents all that he should strive to be. He thinks that she'll love him regardless. But she'll be too tired tonight to comfort him.

The fight was as deafening as John Wayne's wars, both adults throwing accusations against the wall and every shot sticks to the impressionable ears that tried to muffle the sound by dumping out the contents of his toy box and climbing inside. The lid covered him, coffin-like, and in no way sufficient to the task. Their words are monsters that scurry from beneath his bed to bite at his insides but the motion picture nightlight keeps him awake, defeating all the creatures that mom's bitterness and dad's hostility invoke. The world captured within the Zenith portable is safe. What lies beyond the touch of the flickering glow is uncertain, loud and increasingly avoided.

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**Hierophobia (fear of sacred things)**

The yelling stops when they lower her body into the ground. He's old enough to recognize the word 'cancer' when the adults use it to explain everything. But it doesn't answer why she was lying on the floor next to an open pill bottle. He's seen those before, knows she takes them to stay calm when dad forgets to come home and she's too sick to find him. A grandmother had been swallowed by a rectangular hole recently and he's already accustomed to her absence. Mom's not coming back, his father tells eight year old Junior, who wonders if he's supposed to get used to that too. It seems improbable because the empty space she's created is too deep for cold words to fill. This is called mourning, the priest says but Anthony knows already. He'd seen her do it every day of his life.

The last image he'll have of the woman who'd refused to cry but used brownies as apologies is her thin hands gripping a wooden crucifix as though it's the hall pass to heaven. They'll either let her in because of the carved cross or she'll pound St. Peter in the head with it. If chunks of wood decide fate, he'll stay away from them for the rest of his life. Because she'd been clutching a rosary just as firmly when he'd found her that day, which only proves that it's bad luck to cling to God's toys when He expects them back. When dad's pretty secretary says that the Good Lord called an angel home, he kicks her in the shin.

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**Novercaphobia (fear of stepmothers)**

A downpour halts the lives of a hundred young men, the fields taking the brunt of Mother Nature's PMS in a soggy reminder that there is no purpose in a Saturday interrupted. The choir of disappointed sighs reaches Tony and he echoes the sentiment. No football today. His knee aches from yesterday's basketball final, a game won under the eyes of proud parents. So he's told. Massachusetts isn't an unreasonable distance from his Long Island home but by all accounts, he now resides in another stratosphere. Dad couldn't make the trip. Work is the insurmountable ghost that answers the few requests for time that the boy might put forth. Never to his father, of course. Tony must step through the swinging door of replacement mothers. Their names aren't usually unfamiliar; most have answered Senior's business phone before graduating to the house line. At least someone's invited home.

Boarding school had been presented as a sign of trust in the maturing ten year old but five years and three locations later, Tony understands that this is human storage. Unwanted items are placed in bins under the out-of-sight, out-of-mind principle and he's no different. The inconvenience of raising a child is overcome by employing someone else to do it. But Tony is a social and athletic youth, making fast friends by telling tall tales and engaging in small talk with Mrs. DiNozzos two through four. He's old enough to have gathered a host of unflattering nicknames for the generic women who are often too young to claim a fifteen year old step-son. It doesn't matter what level of acceptance he reaches; they're never 'mom.'

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**Iatrophobia (fear of doctors)**

The building is never warm, like a cardboard hut in the arctic that no amount of courtesy can thaw. He worries about entrusting his health to a place that can't pay its electric bill but he's been told that it's only his perception. A form of anxiety, the doctor reminds his each time Tony shivers. No matter how routine the check-up or how kind the physician, there's no comfort here. During his extended stay, he had dreamed that a grave was being dug for him next to his mother. He still wakes tasting dirt on his lips as lungs fight for air that they so easily inhale in daylight hours. The medical profession is, on the whole, unimpressed with repeated protestations of wellness, the inability of doctors to say what is desired is why they never write greeting cards.

When the visits become less frequent, no one questions him. Several years removed from a near-fatal piece of mail and he's seen as fine. He is fine. Except for this persistent cough, a gift from a frozen stakeout on the last case. And when his replacement father forces him to enter this building on the fertile threat of new rules, he caves rather than explain the unfounded fear which springs from the mind of a rowdy inner child. The plague is a monster under his bed and a high-def television glow can't vanquish it. She was sick and dropped dead on a Tuesday. A vacant cowboy looked into his soul before falling. Partners leave the hard way but he's still here, blowing into a spirometer and letting cultures expose his lie.

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**Cenophobia (fear of empty spaces)**

Promiscuous is a fair term for it, he supposes. Based on rumor, a superior once advised him to attend therapy for an assumed sex addiction, disbelieving Detective DiNozzo's assurance that the stories are exaggerated. They aren't. The prospect of a night alone is enough to send him trolling, though his standards are high than fiction claims. Leaving the department for the bureau helped, limiting his free time severely enough to cut into the more destructive habits. But exhaustion can't dim the tragedy of an empty apartment. And the more people he buries, the more he craves company, grasping at acquaintances and strangers with equal desperation. It's a void he's never learned to cross, securing his reputation. But no one recognizes the loss behind the deeds. He can't tell them because an agent is meant to be stronger than any single personal crisis.

Which is why she can't understand when he holds her small frame too tightly, lest she depart without his knowledge. The need to feel someone beside him, surrounding him, produces all manner of discomfort for the one sharing his bed. Even in sleep he struggles to let her go. She'll chide him for his reluctant release and he'll always submit. Eventually. It's begun to worry her but he can't explain what drives him to count under his breath the minutes until she returns. The television is switched on, the blues and grays washing over him and if he closes his eyes, he can imagine the light protecting him from the monsters in his head. But she does it better. He's quick to argue when she holds him accountable for keeping her awake with a silly western but he knows the cowboy, wants him to survive this time. Because a happy ending promises safety beyond the Zenith.

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**_Those silly enough to follow me may have gotten roughly 3,854 notices for this story's repeatedly failed posting._ Blame the fickle Fanfic support gods and don't send them the requisite burnt offering...**


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